Possible Epic of Care: A Collaborative Poem Between Andrei Codrescu and Vincent Katz

I was washing an eggplant at the end of the world onFebruary 4 2020 when I heard from Vincent. It wasMozart's 39;s birthday, a momentous event that the melophiliacVincent Katz would never have let pass without acelebratory panegyric. There it was in the email, beginningIts Mozart's39th birthday. He's only 264.years old; Mozart died youngbut kept on living. Vincent and I were older already thanMozart was when he died, but if we had any chance atliving as long as he did we had better get to work. We arepoets but our immortality is far from ensured. Ourcontributions to the archive of the aptly named School forDisembodied Poetics at Naropa University in BoulderColorado are so our only bid for a mozartian afterlife.Not enough. Beginning with Mozart we began our searchfor the aqua vita of the long poem that would be sung bythe melomanes of the future. CoVid was our last chance tomake embodied poetry that would keep living in the future,as long as we washed our vegetables, masked our faces,disinfected the doorknobs, stayed six feet away from allhuman beings -- and wrote to each other via the as-yetuncontaminated internet. And if we kept celebrating ourimmortal predecessors while noting the daily routines topreserve our bodies, we might make it into that future viaour (regularly disinfected) keyboards.Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet-engulfing Plague were we were friends, we werepoets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in itssuperpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who atages past Ninety needed the care and attention that we twocould provide them. Our exchanges quickly became anongoing epic of care. It became also a store ofreminiscences, activities and ideas that paid homage tothe women we cared for, communiques and confessionsthat we would have liked them to appreciate. Happily, atleast for me, my mother was past appreciating ourfabulous antics though she smiled, sometimesappropriately, when I hit Send. She passed away onSeptember 20, 2022, and is now in my room, listeningwithout recourse. Happily, Vincent's mother is, as of thisdate, still listening in her body to this epic of care. Andrei Codrescu